Explore the Publishing Frontier – Lecture one

Welcome to Writers.com's ten-week new media workshop, taught by Amanda Castleman and Mike Keran. The class blog is open to the public, so we can demonstrate feeds and widgets properly (visitors are welcome to sign up here until 1/24/2010). Enrolled students can access private calendars and bulletin boards at the classroom Web site.

We're working on integrating the blog and classroom further. Mike custom-built the workshop space, which Writers.com may adopt for future classes. So we would love feedback to make it even better!

1. Media revolution: Draw that Mammoth
2. Introduction to Web 2.0
3. Blog stars are born
4. Ripples outside the pond
5. But these bloggers are just a buncha punks!
6. Citizen journalism
7. Why should you blog?
8. You're not alone – or screaming into the void
9. Pick a topic. Any topic, as long as it's toe-curling
10. Amanda's experience
11. Bloggers making it work
12. Successful bloggers who moved on
13. Why write without pay? Intro to freeconomics
14. Think geek
15. Ponder your genre
16. Naming and branding your blog
17. What’s in a name?
18. Yet more examples
19. Choose a blog host
20. Anatomy of a blog
21. Taglines
22. Get busy blogging!
23. But eeeek! How do I start?
24. The look and feel of your blog
25. How to navigate the site?
26. Say hello to the class

Media Revolution: Draw that Mammoth

As humans, we have always needed to express ourselves. From prehistoric cave painters to today's Twitter-er, we put our artistic efforts out there for others to enjoy, critique, admire and be inspired by. In primitive times, we only had a handful of peers looking at our work. You could be the best mammoth sketcher in the valley, or, say, the whole mountain range... Later, Gutenberg allowed us to reach a larger audience, sending paper packets around the globe. Today the Internet links us speedily to over 1.4 billion hardwired souls. The more people we connect with, the more useful the medium becomes.

In the stone-age of the Internet – the early 1990s – users shared similar interests through email lists and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). The first website appeared in August 1991 and the first "web log" followed a few years later. Swarthmore College Student Justin Hall began posting commentary in 1994 on Links from the Underground.(He's revved up Justin's Links now).

Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog” in 1997, shortly after his website, www.robotwisdom.com, went live. Geeks jokingly split the new word to read "we blog" a few years later. In 1999, Peter Merholz shortened it to “blog”.That same year, Pitas, the first free publishing service, debuted. Pyra, Groksoup, Edit This Page and Velocinews soon followed.

Back then, blogging was the realm of the technically inclined; only a few hundred blogs lurked online when Pyra Labs released Blogger. For the first time, a printing press was available to anyone with an Internet connection. The barrier to broadcasting people's thoughts had dropped, and broadcast they did! Today over 100 million blogs blaze down the bandwidth – with another 64,000 coming online every day (or even 120,000, depending on your source).

Introduction to Web 2.0

Early web pages were static, much like book content – "read only" mode ... Interactive elements soon crept in such as bulletin boards and data-submission forms. Around 2004, users began taking the driver's seat, actively altering content and debating points with other readers. The jargon for this movement is "web 2.0," as if the Internet were a software program in its second release. Other terms you'll hear bandied about include "participatory web" and "architecture of participation".

Insider talk aside, it boils down to this: with the most basic computer skills, cybersurfers can tinker with some web pages. Examples of this trend include:

• Collective intelligence sites like Wikipedia. A "wiki" allows many users to edit and add content, pooling intelligence.
• Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter that encourage group communication through microblogging, link-sharing and threaded discussions.
• User-generated-content sites like TripAdvisor and parts of Amazon.com that rely on free reviews from users. Also called "crowd-sourced" ... most often by downsized journalists.

We'll discuss the evolution of Web 2.0 sites further throughout the term, as well as the heralded rise of Web 3.0, the semantic web (sites capable of something more closely resembling human thought. For example, in the future, Wikipedia might be able to answer a question, rather than supplying a variety of links, based on keywords).

Blog stars are born

Blogger creators Ev Williams and Meg Hourihan kickstarted the medium. In 2000, the group-authored curio site Boing Boing debuted, delivering up a daily multi-dose of the strange.

At the inaugural Bloggie Awards in 2001, Star Trek’s Wil Wheaton found post-ensign fame and acclaim as an early adopter.That same year, Heather Armstrong was fired for blabbing about her job online. “Dooced” – her site name – became a verb: “fired for blogging.”

Ripples outside the pond

In 2002, Gadget-tastic Gizmodo and gossip Gawker launched, along with BlogAds and Google AdSense Ad syndicating services like these contributed to a whole new profit model complete with virulent jargon (such as "to monetize" a site).

The blogosphere orbited into the mainstream's awareness – and began to warp, erm, influence it. Pundit bloggers helped bring down (then) US Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott for racist comments. Joshu Micah Marshall led the charge in 2002. War bloggers finally attracted headline beyond “hobbyist” circles. And in 2003, Where is Raed? brought international attention to Iraqi Salam Pax (the pseudonym of Raed Jarrar): soon thereafter he publishes The Baghdad Blog book.

Romenesko, The Daily Dish and KausFiles turned up the heat on The New York Times Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal. Eventually Executive Editor Howell Raines stepped down, taking along Managing Editor Gerald Boyd. Merriam-Webster crowned “blog” word of the year in 2004, just as Wonkette snarked onto the scene. Coincidence? Read the blog...

Spring ‘05: Arianna unveiled her glamorous Huffington Post, the liberal “Internet newspaper” and aggregated blog modestly named after herself. The site soon earned the nickname “HuffPo”. It often tops rankings on Technorati and Alexa, while Th Guardian declared it the world’s most influential blog.

But these bloggers are just a buncha punks!

Those geeks are redefining our world. Pay attention. Especially if you want to play in their sandbox.

Learn how to stand on the shoulders of what history will show were giants. These folks are authoring the biggest data evolution in humankind's existence. Even if they wore Keds and board shorts all the time...

Seriously. Read and read and read. Skim three new blogs a day and bookmark or subscribe to any worthy finds. Put out a Google Alert for articles on blogging or customize a section header for Google News (these feeds can be incorporated into your site, but more on that later). You can even tap the dead-tree medium with books like Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers, ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income or Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture.

Citizen journalism

A blogger is a one-woman band: author, photographer, videographer, cartographer, designer, publisher, advertising exec, marketing guru, legal department, etc. That's the pain of the genre – but the beauty too. You're the boss: free to flourish and flounder both without a lot of hoop-jumping.

 

The title "citizen journalist" increasingly applies to people paddling in the datastream like this. This elastic term stretches from reader-comment sidebars to pro-curated sites of user-generated content and blogs writ so large they rival the mainstream media. Take FiveThirtyEight: A site run by a baseball-stats nerd, a poker player, and a documentary filmmaker has a readership akin to the Houston Chronicle's, according to Joshua Benton at Harvard's Neiman Journalism Lab.

Media's converging online in a swirl. Text rubs shoulders with broadcast video now. Bloggers turn pro and pros crowd-source. Indie media is the future, insists pundit Mark Cooper. "It is the independent, citizen and community media that provide the seeds of an alternative journalism, he claims in The Huffington Post. "These alternatives tend to be structured viral communications, in which a light touch of hierarchy can go a long way. The examples are well known, beyond blogging, which tends to be the least organized form of expression. We find things like Wikis, online posts, collaborative production and distribution in peer-to-peer networks, opens source software, crowd sourcing, and new forms of copyright, like the Creative Commons, etc.

"The critical challenge for these outlets is to become trusted intermediaries. The critical challenge for society is to figure out how to tap into the immense energy of the public sphere in cyberspace while preserving key journalistic attributes someplace within a much-expanded public sphere. To build trust, the new journalism will have to produce a steady stream of output that readers find authoritative, correct and useful."

Why should you blog?

Today 120,000 blogs will be born, according to stats from the 2009 Blog World Expo. With so much static in the system, why throw your hat into the ring?

Most blogs spark like meteors: a brief dazzle, then burnout. But some are sticking – and turning the publishing industry on its ear.

“By all appearances, the blog boom is the most democratized revolution in media ever, " notes Clive Thompson in New York Magazine’s “The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom. ”Blogging should be the purest meritocracy there is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nobody from the sticks or a well-connected Harvard grad. If you launch a witty blog in a sexy niche, if you’re good at scrounging for news nuggets, and if you’re dedicated enough to post around the clock—well, there’s nothing separating you from the big successful bloggers, right?”

Well, nothing except some chops: literary, marketing and technical. Not to mention financial savvy. You're taking on every role in a media outlet, from intern cup-washer to publisher, reporter to ad rep, designer to accountant.

And that's why we're here. To map and better navigate the fast-changing new media terrain.

On the way, you may encounter some surprises, beyond "aha" moments about metrics, video links and short-form narrative. As Rebecca Blood, author of The Weblog Handbook, says this is a journey of self-discovery and intellectual self-reliance. “As [the blogger] enunciates his opinions daily, this new awareness of his inner life may develop into a trust in his own perspective. His own reactions – to a poem, to other people, and, yes, to the media – will carry more weight with him … Ideally, he will become less reflexive and more reflective, and find his own opinions and ideas worthy of serious consideration.”

So there you have it: potential fame, fortune and spiritual enlightenment, like California writ large. Get blogging already!

You're not alone – or screaming into the void

• Over 12 million American adults currently blog.
• More than 147 million Americans use the Internet.
  Over 57 million Americans read blogs.
• 1.7 million American adults list making money as one of the reasons they blog.
• 89% of companies surveyed say they think blogs will be more important in the next five years.
• 9% of internet users say they have created blogs.
• 6% of the entire US adult population has created a blog.
• Technorati is currently tracking over 70 million blogs.
• There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day.
• 22 of the 100 most popular websites in the world are blogs.
• 120,000 new blogs are created every day.
• 37% of blog readers began reading blogs in 2005 or 2006.
• 51% of blog readers shop online.
• Blog readers average 23 hours online each week.

Image: Despairwear

Pick a topic. Any topic, as long as it's toe-curling

Blogging can absorb a lot of time and energy. "Budget an hour a day, if you're really serious," recommends Marie Javins, who spun her blog No Hurry into her first travelogue book, Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik.

Food writer Jess Thomson spent 2007 creating, cooking and blogging a recipe a day for Hogwash. "Ultimately, writing a blog helped me discover my voice, and as a result find publications whose tones work best for me," she said. But she also acknowledged the downsides, late in her "year of". "Posting every day has sometimes threatened to strip me of my interest in food. Another f***ing recipe? I normally love to cook at home, but sometimes the temptation of take-out swirls around me simply because I've developed this heavy sense of duty around my blog that doesn't necessarily need to be there."

Thomson soldiered through to New Year's Eve, producing daily. And her efforts paid off. Her blog coverage of Alinea earned a spot in Best Food Writing 2008. She now averages two posts a week, a pace that's revived her enthusiasm.

So pick a subject you love: one you can live with for six months or six years. Darren Rowse of Problogger.net agrees: "While it might be tempting to start blogs based on what other people are interested in or what makes commercial sense, there is little logic in starting a blog on a topic that you have no interest in.

"Your readers will quickly discern if you are passionate about your topic or not. Blogs that are dry and passionless don't tend to grow."

Amanda's Experience

Like many authors, I mix personal and professional topics on my blog. Road Remedies serves as that proverbial shingle in cyberspace. Many of my colleagues read it; editors have even nagged me to "catch it up, because I'm bored at my desk and want to hear about adventures". It also advertises where I've been recently, which has spun into assignments. But mainly it's a way to keep in touch with friends, family and readers – and a platform for colorful snippets that don't make it into articles.

My voice took a tremendous leap forward after a year of blogging. I had returned to writing for writing's sake, rather than being a hired gun. Thanks to this, I won a 2007 Lowell Thomas award (travel writing's ersatz Pulitzer) for this adventure story. So I'm a believer in the transformative power of this medium.

Photo by Jackie de Haven, pirate princess

Bloggers making it work

The classic advice to authors is "read to learn to write". And, yup, it applies in pixels, as well as print. That's why assignments for this workshop include analysis of trends. Reading and critiquing others' work may be the most powerful autodidactic tool in your arsenal. Here are a few sites to kickstart your exploration:

Writer Michelle Goodman picked a niche she's fired up about: helping "cubicle expats transition to part-time, flextime, at-home, outdoor, overseas, nonprofit, or self-employed work." Her blog complements her books The Anti 9-to-5 Guide and My So-Called Freelance Life.

British bad-boy LC has maintained Liars and Lunatics, a snarky commentary online since 2000 (and apparently is e a big-cheese blog consultant in the "meat space").

Gossip monger Perez Hilton dishes up cybersleaze.

Commentator Arianna Huffington launched The Huffington Post in May 2005. Today it's one of the Internet's strongest brands.

Successful bloggers who moved on

Not every blog – or blogger – is built to last forever ... and that's OK. But consider the longevity of your idea and how it dovetails with your goals before embarking.

Here are some authors who exited stage left after a good run:

Fellow blog instructor Rebecca Agiewich scored her first novel deal, Breakup Babe, after chronicling her dating life online. She retired http://breakupbabe.blogspot.com when she realized the confessional wasn't helping said dating life. Now she lives with her boyfriend and keeps a less revealing diary at Sparkly, Sparkly.

Journalist Edward Readicker-Henderson gave himself 131 posts on Unexpected World, then packed up shop. "I found it was taking energy away from the rest of my writing. I also started to feel like I was repeating myself, and so boring myself."

Joe Mathlete seems a little overwhelmed by the popularity of Marmaduke Explained, but sometimes still pokes fun at comic artist Brad Anderson. Because, really, who could stop cold turkey?

Jen Leo launched Written Road, "the inside scoop for the travel publishing world". She moved onto projects about poker and Las Vegas, as well as editing anthologies. A team of volunteers took over Written Road, but standards have slid.

Why write without pay? Intro to freeconomics

Many writers, especially professional ones, balk at blogging and social-network updates. "I get paid to wordsmith," the logic runs. "Who will buy the cow if I give away the milk for free?"

First off, blogging can pay – and well. The genre's already produced millionaire-bloggers like Markus Frind, Kato Leonard, Jason Calacanis and others. Rafat Ali is another classic example. The laid-off dotcom reporter launched PaidContent, a newsletter about the business of online media. In 2002, his first year, he netted somewhere between $60-80,000, as this Wired News article explains. He later sold the site to ContentNext Media, a subset of the Guardian News and Media Ltd group, and still serves as editor in chief.

Ironically, Ali's subject is subject to intense debate right now. People are accustomed to free stuff over the innertubes. Subscription attempts – hiding material behind a paywall – tend to end badly. In 2007 The New York Times unlocked its archives; last year, so did much of The Wall Street Journal.

As Chris Anderson points out in Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, "Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411."

"Freeconomics," he calls this "race to the bottom".

(Embarrassingly, The Virginia Quarterly caught Anderson "borrowing" too liberally from Wikipedia. He claims this was a cut-and-paste error. Still, watch your sources: Don't be a slapdash author like him. As we've nagged before, Wikipedia is a great place to start research and a lousy place to end it. Also, don't be a pirate: t'isn't polite...)

Until ad revenue reaches sustainable levels online, the mainstream media's gonna panic and holler about all this. Here and here you can observe experts crunching numbers for different scenarios for newsrooms.

Angered by shrinking distributions and ad revenue, media mogul Rupert Murdoch might just take all his toys and go home. "Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?" he challenged his peers, before threatening to remove all News Corp. content from the search engine. As both Mashable and The Guardian Media pointed out, this quixotic announcement in November 2009 didn't make the intended big waves. The Independent gives a great breakdown of this drama and its possible end-game – saving newspapers – here. (We'll discuss pay models
and the future of media further throughout the class.)

The Associated Press (AP) took on content aggregators in a radical effort to, well, make some money off the net already. Also, newsgathers want to make sure they get credit where credit's due.

“This is not about defining fair use,” said Sue Cross, executive vice president of the group. “There’s a bigger economic issue at stake here that we’re trying to tackle.”

One goal of the AP and its members, she said, is to make sure that the top search engine results for news are “the original source or the most authoritative source,” not a site that copied or paraphrased the work of news organization.

Europe's ahead of the US on the protection front, but one thing's certain: regardless of geography, hard news from reliable sources remains a key ingredient in cyberspace. The AP's just moving aggressively to protect its interests, which could be a good thing, however initially aggravating.

Much as the blogosphere wants to be bleeding-edge, it lags 2.5 hours behind the main-stream media (MSM) still. And studies show that only 3.5% of blog story lines become headlines. But, as The New York Times points out: "Though the blogosphere as a whole lags behind, a relative handful of blog sites are the quickest to pick up on things that later gain wide attention on the Web, led by Hot Air and Talking Points Memo."

For now, no absolute formulas exist for making money online. Heck, YouTube stood to lose $470 million in 2009, despite dominating the online-video market (luckily it's part of the Google family, which can take a hit like that. See the mothership's rebuttal of "hideous loss" predictions...). And microblogging wunderkind Twitter isn't even sure how to bring in the seriously big bucks, though the company's on its way. The site's grown so popular that people are offering up $250,000 for as-yet-unavailable “spotlighted” accounts. Celebrities like 50 Cent and Britney Spears have hired ghostwriters to pen their 140-word tweets, according to The New York Times. Surely someone will cash in on all this sturm und drang soon.

Why not get yourself a slice of that cake?

Think Geek

To succeed in any medium, you've gotta know it. I've had countless travel writing students express an immediate, burning desire to be in one of National Geographic's magazines. Yet many of these ambitious souls couldn't even name their favorite author in the genre.

First off, that's the equivalent of someone declaring, "I've never had a ballet class, but I'd like the role of Clara in the Met's Nutcracker." Secondly, it's like an aspiring prima ballerina never having heard of Rudolf Nureyev or Margot Fonteyn.

How can you possibly succeed at a thing you know nothing about?

Read. Then read and read and read.

Ponder your genre

Cyberspace contains a world of possibility. Three former PayPal employees followed a hunch in 2005. A year later, Google bought the video-sharing platform YouTube for US$1.65 billion. Not only did they tap the mix-tape pirate in us all, they gave expression to our secret karaoke dreams.

However, mere mortals can't all be the next Steve Chen, Chad Hurley or Jawed Karim (YouTube's founding triumvirate). If you're not burning with the Next Big Idea, consider the blogosphere's proven formulas and how your ambitions fit into 'em.

I encourage you to read (and readreadREAD) some of these links, even those not directly relevant to your topic. A sampling will cue you into what tones and tricks work where.

Advice – This genre extends from tips (CleanTech) to troubleshooting (NTHell) and talk about dating (Miss Information). Gluten-free Girl explains how she found a healthier diet ... and true love and a book deal! I am Fuel, You Are Friends reveals hip new music. And the hero of all journalism coaches – Roy Peter Clark – cheerleads authors with his Writing Tools. Tech-information clearing-houses like Slashdot and Gizmodo and their ilk also fall into this realm.

Entertainment – Just like it sounds, this type of blog aims to brighten readers' days. It's the online equivalent of the newspaper's Lifestyle section. Enjoy silliness from Jezebel's fashion and feminism to The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (fake, but done so well Apple's maestro reads it). Boing Boing's another great example. You could survive without it, sure, but that curated collection of weird certainly amuses...

Dear diary – A journal-type blog opens a window on the writer's world – or some aspect of it, like Jess Thomson's recipe-a-day project for Hogwash. Tom Reynolds kept a blog of his life as an East London Emergency Medical Technician. He eventually landed a book, as did Mimi Smartypants, who relates her Chicago EL squabbles and pious-mom chat-room smackdowns brilliantly.

Gossip – Lean over the virtual back fence and swap tales. Postsecret is a user-generated art project, where readers submit revealing, anonymous, homemade postcards. On the opposite end of the spectrum is that vile, yet insanely successful, celebrity slasher Perez Hilton and offerings like Pittwatch.com. Sneer all you want (I certainly do), but then take a sobering look at Technorati's top search terms tonight: Jennifer Garner (4), Paris Hilton (8), Jennifer Aniston (9) and Vanessa Minnillo (10). Many newspapers and magazines process off-cuts, funny asides and spats with readers. Two examples from Seattle, where Mike and I live. The Slog and the P-I's Big Blog. Sites like these can provide rich pickings for other bloggers to comment upon, since the professional group-authored
sites draw upon a lot of talent. They're hard to compete with, however, for the same reason.

Political – The Huffington Post is the hardest hitter with a stable of columnists, along with Daily Kos. But school-less fish swim in this sea too, like Wonkette and my friend Candace Dempsey. Her blog coverage of the Perugia murder trial led to a book deal with Berkley (a

Penguin imprint). She's also suffered death threats and smear campaigns for her original reporting. Dempsey's dealing with all the hassle that investigative reporters suffer without the support of a newsroom: legal, financial and emotional. Tough stuff.

Freakonomics tackles money matters and "the hidden side of everything". Gary Becker,

the Nobel-winning economist, teams up with Richard Posner, the prominent US judge and legal theorist, to pontificate here. Heavy hitters like Newsweek also weigh in to the political debate online, often supplying material not found in the print magazine.

Promotional – Blogs can draw awareness to a brand, both by creating a community (and buzz), as well as placing fresh content on a corporate site. This helps improve search engine results (SEO). Marketing bods are in a feeding frenzy over fresh content recently and how to capture the new blog/social networking zeitgeist.

Amazon (predictably) gets the tempo right. But with a fleet of talented editors on hand and some

of the best market intel, is that so surprising? General Motors tries hard, but often draws fire for unhip blunders like censoring its comments during controversies. Here's a small British fabrication shop making it work. It's tone is cheeky, like this post, beginning: "Three minutes away you were from having the pleasure of me videoing myself doing a naked umbaba round my back garden in the snow." It's appealing precisely because the author isn't being all starchy and spinning PR puff.

Literary – Blogs can serve as a promotional platform for existing or future books (nothing persuades a publisher like a guaranteed rapt audience). Fellow blog instructor

Rebecca Agiewich scored her first novel deal, Breakup Babe, after chronicling her dating life online. She retired breakupbabe.blogspot.com when she realized the confessional wasn't helping said dating life. Now she keeps a less revealing diary at Sparkly, Sparkly.

Working the other end of the spectrum, Michelle Goodman's blog complements and promotes her books The Anti 9-to-5 Guide and My So-Called Freelance Life. She also taught me the admirable trick of "cheating" a book website in WordPress (its templates allow for those

nifty header-bar navigation tabs: they look less bloggy to my eye...). In a few hours, I whipped ones up for anthologies to which I contributed: Single State of the Union and Greece A Love Story.

I paid Wordpress $15 for one year's worth of domain-name goodness (http://greecealovestory.com) in spring 2007. I only received my second (ignored) renewal notice a few months back: yet the site functions. We'll see if my luck holds...

Venting – Everyone loves a good rant – and the Internet thrives on this. Rat and Mouse allows unhappy home owners to vent their spleens. WalMart Watch takes on the megastore chain for "selling Nazi t-shirts" and other offenses. One complaint from new media watchdog Jim Jarvis was enough to persuade Dell to review its customer service policy. Sometimes the squeaky wheel really does get the oil...

Did I leave any genres out? Oh yeah, porn and cats. I'll give Icanhascheezburger.com a nod and leave it at that.

Cartoon by Shannon Wheeler, author of Too Much Coffee Man

 

Naming and branding your blog

Make the title memorable – and something you can suffer on a T-shirt or a book spine. "What would you rather read: A Blog About Books or Bookslut?" asks Jonathan Yang, author of The Rough Guide to Blogging (2006).

What's in a name?

Online marketing expert Chris Garrett advises the following criteria in his article on Better Blog Branding:

1. Readable
2. Pronounceable
3. Spellable
4. Memorable
5. Concise
6. Unique

Heavy-rotation terms

1. blog - 9.986%
2. life - 2.619%
3. weblog - 1.841%
4. world - 1.296%
5. from - 1.226%
6. journal - 1.139%
7. news - 1.087%
8. thoughts - 1.039%
9. with - 0.670%
10. daily - 0.660%

– research by Elliott C Black

The author said: "This leads me to conclude that any blog named, 'My blog/journal/weblog with daily world news and thoughts from life! will be a smash hit. "

Um.

No.

The hit list

Technorati – the Internet search engine for searching blogs – notes these terms receive heavy traffic:

1. modblog
2. daily
3. girls
4. suicidegirls
5. nikki
6. weblog
7. media
8. from
9. page
10. boing

Yet more examples

Catchy and clear

Attack of the Redneck Mommy – http://www.theredneckmommy.com
Breakup Babe – http://breakupbabe.blogspot.com
Japing Ape – http://japingape.blogspot.com
Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide – http://gizmodo.com
Gluten-Free Girl – http://glutenfreegirl.blogspot.com
Lifehacker – http://lifehacker.com
Postsecret – http://postsecret.blogspot.com

Just plain catchy

Boing Boing – http//boingboing.net
Daily KOs – http://www.dailykos.com/
Jen & Tonic – http://www.jenandtonic.ca
Miss Information – http://www.nerve.com/regulars/missinformation
Mimi Smartypants – http://smartypants.diaryland.com
Slashdot – http://slashdot.org/
Toffeewomble– http://toffeewomble.blogspot.com

Breaking the rules

Anti 9-to-5 Guide – http://www.anti9to5guide.com
Craig Duff Blogs – http://craigduff.wordpress.com
Icanhascheezburger.com– http://icanhascheezburger.com
I am Fuel, You Are Friends – http://fuelfriends.blogspot.com
I’m Not Gay – http://notagay.blogspot.com
Perez Hilton – http://perezhilton.com
Road Remedies – http://roadremedies.blogspot.com
The Huffington Post – http://huffingtonpost.com

Choose a blog host

Starting a blog takes just minutes, thanks to a plethora of host sites. These provide a web address, page templates and tools for posting.

Our class blog runs on Blogger – and most of the functionality examples will be drawn from it. We have Wordpress and LiveJournal accounts as well. We may not be able to answer specific questions about other hosters without screen grabs (aka captures) or access to your account. But really, we recommend Blogger, in part because you can tinker with the templates without suffering a fee.

Advanced "geeks" – no longer a derogatory term, thanks to Obama – can host blogs server-side: this requires, well, a server (a dedicated computer online constantly), and a domain name (www.myblog.com), both of which rack up yearly fees. Don't try this at home. At least, not on the first week of blog class, eh?

Most beginners prefer services like:

• Blogger – a free blogging platform by Google, our recommendation for this class. It allows users to tinker with templates and other code without WordPress's additional fees...
• LiveJournal – blogging tool by SixApart, which offers free basic packages, as well as premium paid ones (from $3/month). Popular for social networking tools.
• Typepad – paid blogging tool by SixApart. After the free trial, prices start at $4.95/month.
• Wordpress – A free and hugely popular hoster, quite simple to use, except for an irritating photo-upload. The platform allows static pages, making it easy to "fake" a static site (useful for authors and small companies often). Be warned, however: Wordpress charges for some services – like the ability to edit template code – free on Blogger and other platforms.
• Xanga – popular among teens and young adults for easy networking (especiallly the guestbook). Free and paid premium services.

DO: Start bookmarking blogs you enjoy. Pay attention to the hosts, templates and features.

DON'T: Succumb to Myspace and Friendster. These are more social networking sites than proper blog tools. Best avoided by those old enough to drink legally.

SUPERHERO OPTION: Radio Userland – schmancy and expensive pro tool that incorporates security controls, an integrated news aggregator, multiple-author capabilities etc. Slick, but not a great starting point for the tech-inhibited.

SUPER FANCY: Server-side and self-hosted blogs. Audioblogs. Podcasting. Videoblogs (vlogs).